East Meets East

Gene Gonzalez just launched another cookbook under Anvil entitled Going East. As with his other books, this one's a thin paperback of basics and some garnish. This book does a good job covering the flavors of Asia - Pinoy (of course), Korean, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, Japanese, Chinese (and whatever i missed) - IN THE RECIPES. He doesn't divide the book into sections with recipes of cuisines of each section's nationality. Instead, he mixes Asia into one happy family for each recipe. So that each recipe supposedly reaches all five basic taste levels: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. He demonstrated this by cooking for us for two recipes in the book. The first was the SOPAS AMPAW, which was simply stock with ampaw dunked in it. A quick taste of the sopas was not impressive at all - even the other foodies at our table agreed - but once I broke in the ampaw, its texture was a nice contrast and having mixed it with the other characters in the soup - the cilantro, the celery, onions and peppers - the sopas developed some flavor. More impressive and a far better demonstration of this umami concept was the second recipe called GENE'S CHA CHANG NOODLES. A quick look at the ingredients will show you that the recipe travels from Japan to Korea to China to Manila. Of the recipe, he says in the book, "I love the Taiwan and Korean versions of this home-cooked noodle dish so I decided to put in other flavors and textures such as Japanese stock, udon noodles, Korean doenjang for a different lift while still maintaining the boasic Taiwanese character." Were the 5 basic tastes there? Absolutely. So don't look for authentic Chinese or authentic Japanese recipes in this guide. The book has the basics with a Gene Gonzalez my-take-on-Asian-cuisine twist. It should make for interesting cooking. Plus I think the book's less than P200. That's cheaper than ONE order of noodles at People's Palace! And here you already get a hundred recipes!